WASHINGTON – Rep. Tom Lantos, who escaped the Nazis to become a forceful voice for human rights as the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress, has died. He was 80.

The California Democrat died early Monday at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Maryland, said his spokeswoman, Lynne Weil. He disclosed last month he had cancer of the esophagus.

At his side were his wife of nearly six decades, Annette, his two daughters and many of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Annette Lantos said in a statement that her husband’s life was “defined by courage, optimism, and unwavering dedication to his principles and to his family.”

Lantos, who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was serving his 14th term in Congress. He had said he would not seek re-election in his Northern California district, which includes the southwest portion of San Francisco and suburbs to the south.

“Tom was a man of character and a champion of human rights,” President Bush said in a statement. “After immigrating to America more than six decades ago, he worked to help oppressed people around the world have the opportunity to live in freedom.

“Tom was a living reminder that we must never turn a blind eye to the suffering of the innocent at the hands of evil men,” Bush said.

Lantos assumed his committee chairmanship when Democrats retook control of Congress. He said at the time that in a sense his whole life had been a preparation for the job – and it was.

Lantos, who called himself “an American by choice,” was born to Jewish parents in Budapest, Hungary, and was 16 when Adolf Hitler occupied Hungary in 1944. He survived by escaping twice from a forced labor camp and coming under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who used his official status to save thousands of Hungarian Jews.

Lantos’ mother and much of his family perished in the Holocaust.

That background gave Lantos a unique moral authority that he used to speak out on foreign policy issues, sometimes courting controversy. In 2006 he was one of five members of Congress arrested outside the Sudanese Embassy protesting what the Bush administration describes as genocide in Darfur.

He was a lead advocate for the 2002 congressional resolution authorizing the Iraq invasion, but later became an outspoken critic of Bush’s handling of the war.

Tall and dignified, Lantos never lost the accent of his native Hungary, but his courtly demeanor belied the cutting comments he could make when he perceived injustice.

“Morally, you are pygmies,” he berated executives of Yahoo Inc. at a November 2007 hearing at which they defended their company’s involvement in the jailing of a Chinese journalist.

“(Lantos) saw his survival from the camps in Europe as a reason to devote his life to help victims of discrimination, oppression and persecution everywhere,” said Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel.

“It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress,” Lantos said upon announcing his retirement. “I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country.”